Raid Progression tips for my 10-man?

[LQDMTL]

So, my 10-man team is a little late to the game. I dinged 85 on release day and was geared very quickly to join raids, however I was forced to move guilds, change mains for the sake of group synergy, etc. Couple that with fluctuating group attendance, shuffling players in and out to find a solid 10 that can work together well... yeah, "a little late to the game" is a nice way to say our progression has sucked.

My guild is split into 5 10-man teams. We're the 4th such team, and one of the newest to solidify our membership. Our guild is 12/12 normal mode, and our 1st team is working on heroics. Each 10-man is comp'd different, raids different nights and different times, etc etc.

My raid team was struggling with 2/12 to 3/12 each week depending upon who we could pug in, up until last week. We finally ironed out some strat changes (warrior taking worms on magmaw, for example) and finalized some staff changes and... we went an easy 6/12 last week (3 shot omnotron for our first team kill, 5 shot maloriak for our first team kill, and 8 shot Valiona & Theralion for our first team kill). By easy I mean to say, we operated very smoothly as a team and simply had some strat tweaks to work out to nail down the victory on each boss.

Our team comp is not ideal. That's one of our struggles. It is currently this:
- holy paladin
- resto druid
- disc/holy priest
- prot paladin
- prot warrior
- enh shaman
- ret paladin
- fury warrior
- sv/mm hunter
- destro/afflic lock

We've got 3 melee, which can be tedious to manage at times. IE: on ascendant council I, the enh shaman, end up melee dps'ing all of the bosses, including the frost guy, and dodging glaciates, running back to clear aegis and help interrupt, etc etc etc. I also end up swinging melee dps on rohash if one of the ranged happens to go down, etc etc... In other words we pull some trickery now and then to get the wins.

Couple that with the fact that on Tuesdays, our lock can't attend. So we end up pugging 1 rdps at least 1 day per week.

We've had this comp for 1 week. We're averaging 16k dps per member right now, which imo means we're doing relatively well for a fresh 10-man team (we average iLevel 353 between us). Our current progression is Halfus, V&T, Ascendant Counsil to 30% in phase 2, Conclave, Magmaw, Omnotron & Maloriak.


With all of that information I ask you:

1 - If this was your team, which zone would you go into lockout progression first and why? We're leaning toward BoT, because we think we're 1 solid raid night away from downing Ascendant Council. However, what problems does 3 melee 2 ranged bring to the table in regards to Cho'Gal?

2 - What bosses are we going to have extreme difficulty with due to our comp? I ask this so that I, as our strat leader, can kind of plan ahead. For example, we're the only 10 in our guild without a DK. Every other 10 downs Magmaw with dk kiting as their strat. We can't do that. We had some difficulty with him, due also to low rdps, until we found the prot warrior strat... which completely trivialized the encounter for us.

3 - In BWD, which boss would you progress on next, and why? We have 0 attempts on any of them so far. Other than some sloppiness under 20% on Maloriak, the fight itself was kind of a joke (we frapsed it and... honestly we made it look easy). I'm going to go ahead and assume the others are more difficult.


Obviously I plan on doing my own research. I'm going to watch videos, read strats, etc. However, it's always nice to get a personal response from someone who's done the content. And since there are plenty of people on this forum who make our progression look retardedly bad, I come to you for tips and tricks. What would YOU do, knowing what you know now, if you were in our position. We want to be 12/12 normal in a hurry and working on heroic modes as fast as possible (and ideally have a few down pre-Firelands).

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Note: Anything such as "change guilds" or "change comps" will just be ignored. We're in our comp, our current team works extremely well together and.. we're happy with that. I'm in the guild I'm in because of the friends I have, and have no plans to change. So... yeah

[AimeriMG]

Change guilds.

No, I'm kidding. If you are that close to killing Ascendant Council, I would do so. Even if Cho'gall is not in the question right now, the gear on people will help with future encounters, and a boss kill helps significantly for boosting the raids morale. After that, go in and see how far you can get on Cho'gall. The amount of melee you have is definitely not favorable in this tier of content, so it would be wise to have your enhancement shaman start working on some elemental gear.

If Cho'gall isn't doable right now for you, move on to BWD (or even start working on Throne of the Four Winds). The first 4 bosses in BWD are easily done, regardless of group composition. Chimaeron is all on the healers. Since there are no adds, and dps basically just stands & burns, your group comp won't matter much. Maloriak doesn't really matter much on your dps composition either, since the adds will be on a tank the entire time. If you use a proper strat, both of those bosses should go down easily.

While Atramedes is not a difficult encounter either, being melee heavy may prove annoying as well. It is definitely something that is within your grasp easily if you can down Ascendant Council though.

If you choose to go into Throne of the Four Winds, Conclave of Wind is a very easy fight once everyone understands the strategy clearly. It will take a few wipes for people to grasp the idea of it, but once they do you'll see very clear progress, if not a quick kill.

From there, you would have Cho'gall, Nefarian, and Al'akir left. Al'akir on 10s is actually very simple as long as everyone does their job. I would personally recommend going to either Cho'gall or Al'Akir on 10s, leaving Nefarian for last.

If you have any questions about some tips for certain encounters, or even possible strats, feel free to send a PM.

Hope this helps your choices!

[lil pink pwny]

First of all leave the zerg guild and get into a legitimate 10/25man guild. It's just a better environment and people tend to take their role more seriously. Rotating in people each week is probably what hurts more than anything. We've had issues with our tanks only being able to make one raid night each week(we do one farm night and one progression night), so for several weeks we had to worry about gearing up 3 different tanks + building up one of our main dps's offset just because we couldn't rely on our 2 main tanks to always show up. If your lock cant make the raid nights he needs to get booted, that's the hard truth.

Actual raid comp doesn't really mean much for 90% of the normal mode bosses in this tier. Most classes overlap on buffs and utility, so its more about tactics and skill than anything until you get to the end bosses. Our raid comp isn't far off from yours and we've had no problem progressing each week. Currently 10/12, clearing all of those bosses in one night, and doing progression fights on the second night. Al'Akir should be down this week and hopefully we'll get solid work done on nef.

You wont be able to do Cho'gall with only two ranged dps, that's almost absolutely certain, especially if you're struggling this hard on the easy bosses. Tank composition doesn't matter much. We've done every possible tank combo aside from double warriors, double dks, or double druids. Your healing comp is fine as well, we run holy pally(me) resto shaman and had a holy/disc priest but now will be using a resto druid. DPS is going to be the main issue. We've done every boss so far except cho'gall with 3 melee without issue, but 3 ranged is preferable for sure. Again actual classes dont matter as long as interrupts and buffs are covered.

I'd say order of difficulty goes something like this. Keep in mind as you get gear some mechanics become trivial, so from a pure progression standpoint this list might not be very valid. This is my pally 357ilvl http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ditea/advanced, so healing most fights is trivial now. I cant say how i;d rate it if i could go back to the heroic starter gear:
Argoloth
Conclave of wind
Magmaw
Chimaeron
Halfus
Omnitron Defense
Maloriak
Atremedes
Valonia and Theralion
Ascendant Council
Cho'Gall
Al'Akir
Nefarian

I place cho'gall before al'akir because once you get the strat down for chogall it's just rinse and repeat, whereas al'akir is a very RNG heavy fight that can wipe you in the first 30 seconds if someone get double teamed by a lightning then gust into a tornado. Plus my guild sucks at stacking on phase 3.

Oh and dont do raid lockout extensions. That's just dumb unless you're doing hardmodes and your guys are already heavily geared out. Getting gear is an essential part of progression as is refining your ability to down farm bosses quickly. And dont even think about attempting cho'gal until you can competently down ALL non-end bosses in a solid night and a half of raiding. In my opinion the end bosses are an order of magnitude above any of the other bosses. Some people say chogall is actually easier than council but I disagree.

[MestHoop]

To all the people going: OMG LEAVE THAT GUILD. You do realize that this person himself would most likely have to lead these people if they made their own guild (outside of raids as well). Coming from a GM, this is more responsibility than most people would like to take on their shoulders for a game.

Now, to your issue!
As someone said before, ask your shaman if he wants to start getting ele gear for fights where many melee become a problem. If you put it this way he won't feel forced, and can stay enh for the bosses where it doesn't matter. You don't have a resto shaman in that group, so passing mail int gear to him shouldn't be too much of a problem

Now as for what bosses to go for: I'd avoid Cho'Gall at first with that set-up.
The problem with it is that as the fight goes on, there are more and more adds spawning. Adds that deal nasty effects when they get close, so you want strong AoE ranged classes (fire mage, surv hunter, etc). This won't become much of a problem for you in 4.1, but I think the AoE your players have right now is a bit too low, unless you wanna 2 heal it (which is a PAIN in phase 2).

IMO Atramedes and Chimaeron are a lot more straight forward than AC and CG, but since you're on AC already I'd say down that and not look back at BoT for the time being and start clearing towards Nef and Al'Akir.
Out of the 3 end bosses I found Al'Akir to be the easiest. This is because there's very little RNG to it, but a lot of planning (2 abilities hitting at once? Prepare for it ahead of time and you'll be fine, don't throw your hands up in the air and yell "FUCKING RNG". All of his abilities can be anticipated).

Coming from someone who just downed Nef 10 man last night for the first time: 3 melee there will be a big plus

[Deleted]

#1 30% is like just into last phase eh? Work on bringing the bosses to 25% at the same time and it's easy. So if I had to extend a lockout it would probably be that.

#2 I'm thinking cho'gall might be a pain with all the adds and shit, but I'm not really sure how threat works on the small adds you need to aoe. With hunter trap and lock it might be okay. The rest are not comp dependent at all.

#3 I would go for Atramedes, he is one of the easiest bosses in bwd once you learn the strategy. Here's a simple strategy. You tank dragon in the middle of the room. You stack everyone 90 degrees away from the tank on the right side of the dragon. Everytime the rings appear everyone moves right for about 2 seconds. If someone gets targetted by flame that person moves left while the others move right again for 2 seconds. You assign a person to click the gong when the searing flame timer approaches. As for air phase everyone runs north, when someone is targetted everyone else runs south, once the targetted person reaches the top he calls for a gong and the assigned gong clicker continues (in your case most likely the warrior who can intervene and heroic leap). Holy priest b&s speed shield is insane here, so I suggest using that on the targetted person in air phase and if possible also on the person targetted in the ground phase for breath. After air phase you generally have about 20 seconds to restack and repeat from the top.

[MestHoop]

#3 I would go for Atramedes, he is one of the easiest bosses in bwd once you learn the strategy. Here's a simple strategy. You tank dragon in the middle of the room. You stack everyone 90 degrees away from the tank on the right side of the dragon. Everytime the rings appear everyone moves right for about 2 seconds. If someone gets targetted by flame that person moves left while the others move right again for 2 seconds. You assign a person to click the gong when the searing flame timer approaches. As for air phase everyone runs north, when someone is targetted everyone else runs south, once the targetted person reaches the top he calls for a gong and the assigned gong clicker continues (in your case most likely the warrior who can intervene and heroic leap). Holy priest b&s speed shield is insane here, so I suggest using that on the targetted person in air phase and if possible also on the person targetted in the ground phase for breath. After air phase you generally have about 20 seconds to restack and repeat from the top.

What he said
You can also have your enh shaman kiting the flames as ghost wolf form helps a lot here!

[LQDMTL]

Responding to a few points, because some details appear to have been missed / lost:

- We were only rotating members trying to solidify a solid, perma-slot 10-man team. We have that team now and aren't rotating members anymore. When I say my guild is 5 10-man teams, that means each team has 10 permanent members (once set). That only changes when attendance becomes an issue or someone quits/leaves.

- I am the enh shaman, and my offspec is resto. The ret's offspec is holy. The holy pal's offspec is prot. The resto dru's offspec is boom... we have SOME freedom to swap specs on the fly, but prefer to stick to our mainspecs if at all possible. The most likely swap for a range-heavy fight would be enh going heals and resto dru going boomkin. However, the dru is our very best healer so we save that as a last resort.

- by 30% on ascendent council I meant both mobs at around 30%, so just above kicking into phase 3 (captain planet). We got a strat tip from g1 after our week of raiding ended that we plan to use this week, and that is to have everyone get the lev debuff/buff and just heal through the air ultimates using divine guardian to cut the damage we take. Will take a bit of practice but, we have phase 1 clearly mastered and dps wasn't our issue at all in phase 2.

- we've already been downing conclave. with our current comp we should be able to 1-shot it, actually, aside from wind-blast hiccups on rohash.

Seems to me like AC & Atramedes are our next targets. I'll see about putting that strat into action this week (for atramedes), and I'll let you know how it goes. I'll even try doing the kiting.

@mesthoop - Unfortunately you're mostly correct. The more progressed guilds on server are all losing members because they don't have any raid slots available (thanks 10/25 shared lockouts). Which means I'd have to either take a step back to an even worse situation, or start my own thing. And... my server sucks for starting a new guild, because... well it's Azjol-Nerub...

[MestHoop]

OT: That AC strat sounds like a lazy man's version to me :\
Are people truly having problems with picking up the right buff?

[LQDMTL]

OT: That AC strat sounds like a lazy man's version to me :\
Are people truly having problems with picking up the right buff?

We've only been to them once. 5 attempts. Got to phase 2 twice. Phase 2 seemed like chaos, but manageable. If we can cut the chaos, why not? We walked away that night feeling like we had a win in the bag with just a little more practice (we could taste it, so to speak). And that was prior to hearing this "tip".

[davesurfer]

We've only been to them once. 5 attempts. Got to phase 2 twice. Phase 2 seemed like chaos, but manageable. If we can cut the chaos, why not? We walked away that night feeling like we had a win in the bag with just a little more practice (we could taste it, so to speak). And that was prior to hearing this "tip".

It really isn't bad once you get used to it. It did take us 5 tries to get to last phase and a few to get through it. Just have one person assigned to calling out what buff and where the 2 things are. Also there is a shield on the earth dude that if you burn through it before it wears off, it drops him by 10%. This can be a curse or blessing. If timed right it can take him to like 17%, if timed wrong it can shift phase when the other dude is over 30%

[MestHoop]

It really isn't bad once you get used to it. It did take us 5 tries to get to last phase and a few to get through it. Just have one person assigned to calling out what buff and where the 2 things are. Also there is a shield on the earth dude that if you burn through it before it wears off, it drops him by 10%. This can be a curse or blessing. If timed right it can take him to like 17%, if timed wrong it can shift phase when the other dude is over 30%

Yea, for this reason we have everyone on arion to nuke him down to 35 to 30% (stop at 35% and dots take him down to 30).
Then swap everyone to the earth one (keep forgetting the damn name). Worst case: the shield doesn't leapfrog and he goes to 25% and the other one is around that as well due to tank damage, or it leapfrogs, earth one on 17% and other one on around 25%.

The tank takes more damage though, but we've never seen this as a problem.

[lil pink pwny]

We've only been to them once. 5 attempts. Got to phase 2 twice. Phase 2 seemed like chaos, but manageable. If we can cut the chaos, why not? We walked away that night feeling like we had a win in the bag with just a little more practice (we could taste it, so to speak). And that was prior to hearing this "tip".

Cheating(I dont mean that you guys are doing anything against blizzard rules or whatever) mechanics to make a fight easier might be reasonable if there is no other option(say a broken fight pre-nerf) but it's not a good idea especially where you're at in progression. If healing isn't an issue, and dps isnt an issue, there is no reason you guys cant be switching debuffs. All it requires is situational awareness, which is something you absolutely must perfect if you want any shot at downing the end bosses. Phase 2 is a good example of the kind of "everyone MUST pay attention" type mechanics that all of the harder bosses in this tier require.

Dont cheese the fight with levitate, it'll only make you weaker when you have to watch out for shadow crashes on cho'gal and tornados on al'akir, etc.

[Navoan]

The only boss you'll maybe run into any problems with in BWD with 3 melee is Atramedes, but even so if they're pulling out 16k dps it'll not be a problem at all. Maloriak/Chimaeron will be fine with melee, even nef if you're not planning to get a Crackle in p2.

If you're ranged dps arn't on the ball with AoE for the adds on Cho'gall you could face problems there too (adds hitting you = c.blood = bad).
Get your hunter to go Surv with Entrapment, lock will need Shadowfury to help with MC interupts and stun on the adds. Your melee can't really do too much 'ranged' dmg to the adds so you could get run over with 20 adds up, you simply have to try it and see. For p2 cho'gall 3 melee is almost beneficial in terms of interupting the adds.